


Increasingly Uncomfortable Realizations

by Weevilo707



Series: Of Heaven and Earth Alternate Timeline AU [3]
Category: Gravity Falls, Homestuck
Genre: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, I suppose that counts, M/M, Mistaken Identity, Of Heaven and Earth, Realization, Spirit AU, well enemies to friends to crushes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-04
Updated: 2017-02-04
Packaged: 2018-09-22 01:54:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9577001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Weevilo707/pseuds/Weevilo707
Summary: John was trying so hard not to make the same mistakes that all of his friends kept making. As time went on though he couldn't stop having several increasingly uncomfortable realizations that he was failing at that in just about every regard.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [0urhappygirl500](https://archiveofourown.org/users/0urhappygirl500/gifts).



John wasn’t sure where shit had gone wrong but oh god shit had gone so very wrong. How in the world did this happen? How in the world did he _let_ this happen?

Well, he guessed it wasn’t exactly something he did on purpose. In fact he was pretty sure it was something he actively tried to resist. He wasn’t like Karkat, he couldn’t just make nice with the hunters. Maybe he didn’t hate them as much as before, some of them actually seemed like nice people even. That didn’t change the fact that at the end of the day, they were still trying to kill each other, and while he was fine with backing off of a few for Karkat’s sake he wasn’t ever going to be buddies with them. 

Or at least, he was trying really hard not to be. 

He was starting to think he understood where Karkat was coming from when he started getting closer to that hunter Dave though. Or what Terezi had felt before. He still didn't know the full story to that, but he knew enough to know it was bad. 

It wasn’t particularly something he ever wanted to understand. 

He didn’t know what to think when he first met the hunter. Well mostly he was thinking that he hoped he could get away without hurting them too badly. Normally he wouldn’t care about some nameless hunter, especially one he’d never seen before. The issue there though was that they weren’t quite so nameless. 

He met Mabel first, and if he hadn’t he definitely wouldn’t have cared as much what happened to them. Even then, he didn’t care about _them,_ he cared about not upsetting his new friend. Mabel was so nice, and it was obvious that she cared about her twin when she talked about them. So when John had seen a hunter that looked exactly like her but with shorter hair, he was pretty sure he knew exactly who they were. 

That hunter hadn’t known who he was though, besides a spirit and therefor the enemy. John couldn't blame them for thinking like that, he was the same way when it came to hunters. He guessed it wouldn’t have matter to them either if they did know too. They attacked him, and John was kind of surprised by the way they actually managed to hold their own against him for a while. Especially for a new hunter, that was pretty impressive. Thankfully John was able to get away from him without anything going too wrong. Neither of them had gotten hurt at least, which was all he was asking for at the time. 

After that first meeting though John went to go ask Mabel some more about them. Not a lot, he didn’t want to know a lot about any hunter. He’s already seen the kind of mess getting too close to one of those people could get you in, and he wanted to stay as far away from all that as possible. He’d already had enough second hand from everything Karkat had been going through lately. He just wanted to know why her twin had become a hunter when she was a spirit and if she was safe from him or not. He was a good hunter, and Mabel was new. If she was attacked John wasn’t sure that she’d be able to hold her own. 

It was kind of annoying when Mabel said that he didn’t believe that spirits were actual people. They definitely didn’t think spirits were the people they looked like. John knew a lot of people thought that. Fuck, he knew all too well that people close to them would flat out reuse to believe it was them, but it still hurt a bit whenever someone did. They were people, they were _themselves,_ even if others didn’t want to believe it. 

Of course that meant Dipper (weird nickname, but hey he guessed they all kind of had weird nicknames from the codenames hunters gave them) didn’t believe she was really Mabel either. Which was kinda sad. Mabel tried to act like it didn’t bother her that much, that she knew her dumb twin would come to their senses eventually, but it was still obvious that it hurt her. 

So John tried to ignore the little feeling nagging at the back of his mind that this was a bad idea and decided that if there was some way he could help change her twin’s mind, he would. 

It was just. He knew what it was like to have family refuse to believe he was himself. So if he could change that for his new friend, he wanted to. 

Even still, he didn’t exactly go out trying to find her twin or anything like that. Mostly he stayed around Mabel as much as he could. He figured this was the best thing to do because that way if her twin happened to show up then he would have a chance to try and talk some sense into them. If that failed, he could at least protect her, because he was pretty sure that she wasn’t even going to fight them. 

The other reason was because he liked spending time with Mabel. She was fun and happy and upbeat and just so different from how most people are so soon after becoming a spirit, it was a welcomed change. 

John was right and eventually her twin did show up again, attacking Mabel with some misplaced notion that she was some demon who was trying to taunt him. It was a lot harder to watch then John thought it would be. He was so used to Mabel being so happy and able to brave through pretty much anything with a smile, it hurt to see her crying and begging her twin to believe it was her. 

It was even worse when they continued to not listen to her. John regretted slamming them up against a wall afterwards, but in the moment he needed to do _something_ to get them to stop attacking and repeating over and over again under their breath ‘trust no one, trust _no one.’_

It probably didn’t do anything to win points in the whole trust department, but it did stop them for the time being. 

John hadn’t been able to convince them that it was Mabel that time. All he’d been able to do was get her out of there and make sure that neither of them were hurt. He guessed that he should be thankful that he was able to do that much, but it didn’t make it feel any less like he failed a little bit. 

He didn’t see Dipper very often after that, but he didn’t see most hunters often and he didn’t want to. Being around hunters meant fighting for his life and feeling terrible about all of his choices, and he wanted as little of that as humanly possible. 

He wasn’t there when Dipper finally accepted that Mabel was really herself. He didn’t even know it happened for a little while. He wasn’t sure where she’d gone off to, but he wasn’t too worried about it. She was a lot stronger than he thought at first, and it wasn’t unlike her to go off on random whims. He hadn’t thought it was anything too serious, or else he probably should have heard about it. 

So when he did run into Dipper again then and the hunter didn’t immediately attack him, John was suddenly very worried that something was actually very fucking wrong. It was enough to scare him into not attacking either. 

He didn’t expect for the next thing to happen be Dipper apologizing to him. He still wasn’t sure why at first, but then Dipper was saying that they were wrong and it was Mabel and she’d said that John was a friend who’d been helping her and they were just so sorry. 

John had no idea how to feel about that. It was all weirdly sincere and Dipper seemed really upset about not believing her and instead of doing anything smart John just kind of turned and ran away, leaving them there alone. 

Probably not the best thing he could have done, but he didn’t know what else to do. 

It was weird after that. Mabel seemed a lot more genuinely happy. John had noticed the way she was forcing some of it before, but with her twin accepting her a lot of that seemed to have gone away. That was definitely nice. It was good seeing Mabel happy. 

The other weird part was that Dipper was around a lot more. Around and not a threat. John couldn’t exactly complain about it either, he was glad that Mabel still got to have her family. Dipper didn’t even seem to be all that bad. The opposite actually, they seemed as fun to hang out with as Mabel. They had a _lot_ in common with John too. He hadn’t expected that at all. 

It didn’t help that Mabel would always talk about how much she was sure they’d get along and kept trying to form some sort of friendship between the two of them. It _really_ didn’t help that it was working, either. 

John wasn’t sure where it turned from an exceptionally awkward friendship he didn’t want to have at all into whatever it was that was happening now. 

It’s not a crush. Or well, he really, really didn’t want it to be a crush. Those never led to anything good, especially not when it was on a hunter. Sure it was like, going a little better for Karkat than it had for Terezi so far, but that proved nothing. 

He didn’t want to stop seeing them because of weird not feelings though. That would be rude and probably mean that there was something there if he was trying to stay away from it. Really, the only way to prove that it was nothing was to spend even more time hanging out together. 

John wasn’t too sure how he didn’t see that plan backfiring, but oh boy did it backfire. 

Dipper was nice. Super nice, and it was kind of uncomfortable, he didn’t want them to be so nice and fun and easy to talk to. It was getting so hard to ignore, which wasn’t fair. He was usually great at ignoring his feelings, although he guessed he was more used to suppressing the negative stuff rather than these things that were actually kind of nice. 

He didn’t want to admit it at all, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that he might have had a little crush on Dipper. Like, a small one. It wasn’t a big deal or anything like that, he wasn’t going to _do_ anything about it. After all it wasn’t like Dipper liked him back or anything like that. 

So that just left John definitely not moping about it and maybe avoiding Dipper the littlest bit. That was how he fixed all his other problems after all. 

He was hanging out with Mabel right now, and thankfully Dipper wasn’t there or else he’d have to think of some excuse to leave. He was trying not to be mopey, but he was pretty sure Mabel could tell that something was wrong. She wasn’t directly pressing him on it though, which was good. It was hard to keep something from her, she was a very persistent person when she set her mind on finding out something. 

She was talking about Dipper right now, and John wasn’t paying the most attention. He knew he should be, he didn’t want to be rude but it was just not something he wanted to focus on right now. 

“So yeah, Dipper’s been talking about how he got that new dungeons, dungeons and more dungeons game, you two should play it together. It’s way too nerdy for my tastes but I think you’ll like it and Dipper has been begging to find someone to play it. My brother is such a dork sometimes,” Mabel rambled on a bit. John started to nod in agreement, because yeah, Dipper was dorky at times but that was what was fun about wait what? 

“What did you just say?” he asked, because that had to be wrong. He’d known Dipper for a while now and there was no way he’d been unaware of something like that. 

There was _no way_ John wouldn’t have known that Dipper was a boy. Mabel always referred to them as her twin and they looked almost exactly alike, he’d just _assumed._

“Dipper’s a dork?” Mabel asked, sounding confused and looking like she had no idea what he was talking about. She probably didn’t, this wasn’t even close to something that’d come up before. 

“No, not that. The uh, the other thing. What did you just call them?” John asked. That only seemed to confuse her even more. 

“My brother?” she asked, and John swore his face would have started to heat up if there was any blood left in him. There was no way this was happening. 

“Dipper’s a _boy?”_ he asked, because it was the only thing he could say at this point. Mabel stared at him in silence for a few long moments before bursting out laughing without any sort of warning. John just hid his face in his hands. It was bad enough that he’d accepted the fact that he kinda had a crush on her. Him. Fuck. 

“Y-yes, Dipper’s a, pfff, Dipper’s a boy. Did you really not _know_ that?” Mabel asked, practically doubled over with laughter. John tried to hide his face even more. 

“Maybe,” he mumbled, trying to push down some of the embarrassment. It was a fruitless battle, he was never going to stop being embarrassed by this. 

“Oh maaaan, how long have you guys been hanging out now? This is amazing,” Mabel continued, and John couldn’t blame her for being amused by this. It was so dumb, he was so dumb. 

Could he go back on liking him if he already accepted it? Nothing had changed about Dipper. Nothing had changed at all John had found out a thing that had always been but he was too dumb to know before. John just. He didn’t ever consider liking a _boy_ before. He never considered liking a hunter either though and that didn’t exactly go according to plan. 

“Please don’t tell Dipper about this,” John said, and Mabel smiled and waved away his concern. 

“Your secrets safe with me,” she said, amusement still in her voice. 

“Thanks,” he said before sighing heavily. This was a lot to process, it would be a while before he was comfortable with it. He guessed it didn’t matter if it took a long time, since it wasn’t like he was ever going to actually date Dipper or anything like that. 

“Hey John, you okay?” Mabel asked, actually seeming a little worried about him. John quickly nodded before standing up. 

“Yeah, I’m fine. Let Dipper know I think playing that game sounds like fun,” he said. It seemed to be enough for Mabel for now and she smiled happily. 

“Will do!” she assured him. 

“Okay, talk to you later,” John said as he left. He liked hanging out with Mabel but he needed to go and think about all of this some more. He needed to take it all in and then ignore it or something. Ignoring things seemed to work for most of his problems after all. 

A part of him didn’t want to ignore his feelings for Dipper though. He guessed that was just another thing he had to think about. 

There was so much he had to think about now.

**Author's Note:**

> this was a request for Our-happygirl500-fan, for a gravity falls/homestuck crossover in my Of Heaven and Earth fanfiction universe. This was really fun to write! I hope you enjoyed it!


End file.
